


(With)standing Motion

by orphan_account



Series: Standing Verse [1]
Category: AFI
Genre: Angst, Falling in love with your best friend, Frat House era, M/M, implied suicidal ideation, late Black Sails era, my take on canon, self injury, the Standing universe, writing AOD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 21:57:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3224891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade’s never been as good at taking as Davey is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is chronologically the first piece in the Standing universe, a three part series I wrote over the course of over four years, in an effort to illustrate what I think really happened, if something really happened. I wrote most of Standing while in college, so it's heavily steeped with literary references, existential crises, and philosophical ramblings about the nature of love, art, and innocence (or the lack of). 
> 
> Though this story takes place prior to Standing, Still, I wrote it second. I would read it second, too. It makes it all the more miserable.

August 1998

People keep apologizing for things: the mess, the stains in the carpet, the beer cans, the perpetually empty cupboards and fridge that are stocked only with instant oatmeal and half-moldy takeout boxes. 

But Jade keeps on saying it’s okay. After all, almost anything is better than living in the dorms. So he eats a lot of instant oatmeal, and lives on a blow up air mattress on Davey’s floor. The plastic of it makes him sweat and stick to the raggedy sheet, and he wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes with that AFI song in his head, quietly humming _the sheets stick to my skin_ in a sleepy murmur until he realizes he’s not an AFI fan anymore, he’s _in_ AFI, and that’s _his_ song, now. 

And that freaks him out more than the stains or the beer cans, because he’s always sort of been afraid of this. Davey took him out onto the balcony a month or so ago and he can only remember half of what they talked about because he was partially afraid the flimsy ass piece of shit was going to fall right off the side of the building, but he’s pretty sure Davey said, _I’ve been dying to work with you since I met you._

This blows Jade away. In part because the notion of fourteen year old Davey wanting to work _period_ , let alone with _him_ is unbelievable, but mostly because Jade’s automatic response was _I have, too_. Which is a lie. An understatement, maybe. But certainly not the truth. 

Jade has always been incredibly scared to work with Davey. If he knew how to write, or even fucking _talk_ which most of the time is a challenge, Jade might be able to explain why the whole thing scares him, but right now it’s just this image of a dam crumbling, and a cascade of black water rushing out and drowning the whole San Francisco Bay. The balcony falling off the side of the building into a wreck of crumbled plaster and broken bones and their blood, a combined mess. 

He’s scared to be in AFI. He’s scared to work with Davey, because he’s not sure he can stop himself from going insane, taking too much, or burning the whole stupid house down. Jade knows, deep down, that if he and Davey write songs together, there’s a serious danger of combustion, and he might not be able to protect himself if he lets it happen. They could end the world. 

But of course, it’s late and Jade’s half asleep and he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s thinking about. Of course he and Davey can’t end the world. They can’t even _change_ it, after all they’re just kids, and Jade doesn’t even know how to ask for what he wants on most days. He won’t take to much. Give too much, maybe, but Jade will never take. 

So he rolls over, disentangling his legs from the constricting grip of smothering sheets, and listens to the soft in and out sleep-breath coming from Davey’s bed. Maybe he’s freaked out because he knows that when he and Davey start writing songs, _they’ll_ change. He’ll change. 

He’s never been comfortable with movement, but Davey is like a river. Jade shakes his head, trying to clear the repeating loop of words: _What will it take?/ I wonder what it's like/ exposed outside/ Would I be safe?_

 

~*~  
February 1998

_You brought your fag inside? I thought you were gonna tie him up to the bike rack_ , some asshole with a red baseball cap says. Jade’s not even sure the comment’s directed at him at first, but everyone turns to stare at him and Davey, Davey with his dyed hair and eyeliner and small stature. Clearly the fag he’s referring to. 

It’s in the instant Jade processes everything that he feels his fist sting with hot impact, a whirr of crimson and white sparkling behind his eyelids. There’s a blissful second of aching knuckles and air forced in short bursts from his lungs, and then Jade’s being held back, Adam’s grip fierce around his biceps, his own brother’s face twisted in shock, which was saying a lot because Smith’s temper was a force to be reckoned with. 

“What the _fuck_ Jade, since when do you pick fights?!” Adam asked, steering Jade by his shoulders out of the service station, thumbs biting between his shoulder blades. Smith stays inside, talking animatedly to the douche with the bleeding nose, covering their ass. Jade is half amazed that he’s done this, the other half of him completely preoccupied with his fag and wherever he’s disappeared to. 

“Where’s Dave?!” he asks, struggling to free himself from Adam’s grip. 

“Will you cool the fuck off? He’s fine. When did you get so goddamn _protective_ of him?” Adam finally lets go, pushing Jade a little bit before crossing his arms over his chest. It’s raining outside now, a misty, directionless rain barely more than fog. Jade can feel tiny droplets of water start to cling to him, making glitter in his lashes. 

He blinks furiously, scanning the sidewalk and gas station miserably for Davey, a blot of darkness in too much runny wet shit. He can feel Adam’s blue eyes on him, ice cold and judgmental. 

“Well,what do you have anything to say for yourself?” Adam snaps, and Jade pulls his eyes from their desperate search only for a moment. 

“That you’re not my mom, dude. Lay off.” 

“You can’t pull shit like that,” is the last thing Adam says before Smith and Davey slam out of the service station, pointing to the van with unconcealed urgency. Davey’s cheeks are bright and Jade can tell by the tightness around his shoulders that he’s angry. There’s a sinking in his gut, which swiftly replaces the wild euphoria. 

“Shit,” Jade mumbles, mind jumping over an array of clumsy apologies. Davey sits shotgun stony and silent and Smith leaves tire rubber on the asphalt when they leave, windshield wipers cutting through a slithering layer of rain. 

~*~

February 1999

Jade listens to the steady two-beat thump of his heart, _I am, I am, I am_. He read _The Bell Jar_ his junior year for his American Women Novelists class, and like spiders, car accidents, and writing music with Davey, it scared him. Jade’s never thought of himself as a scared type of person, but the ever increasing amount of time he spends with Davey is shaking the way he used to think of himself, in terms of his fears, and everything else. 

He used to think he knew shit, knew _everything_ because he was twenty one, but now he’s pretty sure he never knew anyfuckingthing. 

No one has ever known him like this, known him without trying. He doesn’t tell Davey things, he’s actually quite terrified to tell him _anything_. He worries that opening his chest and exposing all the careful clockwork tick ticking away in there (I am, I am, I am) will push Davey away, will reveal that not only is Jade boring and flesh and blood and unmagical like everyone else, but that he’s flawed. Unglamorously flawed, flawed in the way every kid finds out their parents are, flawed in the way fans find out their idols are. 

Hypocritical, traitorous. 

Jade doesn’t want to be any of these things, so he shuts up. Still, Davey pries and somehow finds stuff out, like it leaks through Jade’s cracks while he’s sleeping and seeps into Davey’s bedsheets. 

It’s after a particularly bad day when Jade learns this lesson again, because it’s not like it hasn’t happened before. 

He’s shit at hiding it. They’re sitting on the air mattress with a tattered chessboard between them when Davey’s eyes grow dark and his lips flatten out dangerously. He hooks a finger in Jade’s black sweatband so his finger is _touching_ the torn flesh of his forearm, and Jade leaps as if he’s been burnt, upending a knight, four pawns, and the queen. He clutches himself and looks invaded. 

Davey’s voice shakes like a tightrope as he says, “why didn’t you talk to me.” 

They were lying down but now they’ve both sprung to crunched balls, arms drawn tight around knees. Jade chews the inside of his cheek to a raw pulp as he thinks of what to say. 

“You can always talk to me,” Davey says heavily, and Jade thinks he’s wrong.

“I don’t want to be a pain in your ass,” Jade snaps, surprising them both with the firmness of it. They’re quiet for a long time, Davey’s eyes wide and dark and mournful as they bore holes into Jade’s curled body. 

Jade picks at a hole in his sock, arm stinging, and Davey finally says “I want you to _need_ me.” He should be pissed off, he should be using his upper hand, but he’s not. Jade notices this, that they’re equals. That he’s sometimes too blind by his own insecurities and hatred of flesh that he forgets it’s mirrored in Davey. 

“I do need you,” Jade answers too quickly, and Davey’s startled backwards by it, flinching and blinking. He’s holding a rook, and Jade imagines its hewn ivory growing warm in his palm. 

“Then _act_ like it,” Davey begs. 

“I feel...I feel like if I open up to you, you won’t be my friend anymore. That you’ll get sick of my shit and leave.” It stumbles out of Jade, chopped up and messy like a chicken carcass on a cutting board. He watches Davey take a deep breath and poke at his lip ring with his tongue. “That the more you push me to open up, the more you’ll find out, and the more you’ll realize you’d rather not hear it.”

“At this point, there’s not a lot you can say to scare me away. I’m not _stuck_ with you, I chose to be your friend,” Davey says in this way that makes it seem painfully obvious, makes it seem like Jade’s never had a friend in his entire life and is just starting to figure this stuff out. He feel hot-faced and shamed, scrutinized under Davey’s refusal to scrutinize him, and instead just look at him as he is, as he was born, as he has come to be. 

He stops himself from responding with, _I’m worried you’ll stop choosing to be my friend when you see who I really am_ , but he knows its pointless because as long as Davey touches his arm without asking, without even _seeing_ what’s scabbed underneath, there’s physical proof he _does_ know who Jade really is. 

“Plus,” Davey adds, cutting his eyes to the rumpled sheets they’re sitting in. “You act like I’m not scared of the same thing.”

And here they sit in the same room, on the same bed, on either side of the same chess board. Jade’s eyes and arm are burning, and Davey is still not running, instead he’s looking at Jade through narrowed eyes like his gaze could crack open his chest and listen to it tell him, _I am, I am, I am._

~*~

July 1999 

When Davey talks, Jade sometimes wants to reach out and touch his wrist, just to prove he’s listening. Other times, he wants to put his hand over Davey’s mouth and stop him, prevent so much brilliance from hitting the air outside, like it doesn’t deserve to be touched by things Davey’s said. 

Often, Jade feels like he doesn’t deserve to be touched by things Davey’s said. The words he sings, the words he _screams_ to the mess of human-ocean beneath him. 

It’s not that Jade thinks Davey is perfect. There’s a distinct difference between idealizing someone and being in awe of them, and Jade is in awe of Davey, but not in awe of his perfection. In awe, perhaps, of his imperfection. 

Davey’s hypocritical, and traitorous. 

But somehow Jade’s okay with it. At this point, there’s not a lot Davey can do to scare Jade away, which is saying a lot because Jade is only just realizing what a tremendous scaredy cat he is. 

Jade’s driving the van to a hotel after playing a show in Memphis, and the air is unspeakably taut between he and Davey, tangible with all the things left unspoken. Jade is going over all the times he touched Davey, felt the soft-over-hardness of his small body slamming into him onstage like a bumper car at Belmont Park, where Jade used to vacation as a kid. He thinks of seagulls and sand in his socks and tries to remember what the view looked like from his dad’s shoulders, but it’s hard to distract himself from the haunting feeling of Davey’s elbow hitting his ribs, Davey’s sweat-soaked hair whipping him in the cheek when he leaned over to use Jade’s microphone.

He shuffles his hands on the steering wheel, face bathed in red light as takes a deep breath. It smells musky and sharp from Davey’s underarms and the rest of the guys sleeping on equipment in the back, since everyone’s sweat off their deodorant. Jade thinks of things to say, but Davey saves him with, “Sorry I was all up on you so many times.” He doesn’t sound sorry. The stage was small; Davey feels entitled to everything. 

“No apology necessary,” Jade answers, and his eyes skitter to Davey’s jagged profile. There’s this nameless emptiness in his chest, and he imagines reaching across the cup holder that separates the drivers side from the passengers and touching Davey’s wrist, his lips. But that doesn’t even seem enough this time so Jade goes as far as to imagine leaning his whole body across that divide during the next stoplight and touching Davey’s wrist with his lips. Davey’s lips with his lips. 

Jade’s skin prickles and he feels oddly sick in this hot-cold way, thinking, _I wonder if I’m getting a fever._ It’s at that precise moment when Jade realizes that he’s just imagined kissing Davey. 

It’s at that precise moment when Jade’s whole universe tilts and he slides several inches to the left, digging his teeth and nails into the uprooted earth in either side of him with a plunge of cold shock closing like water over a drowning man’s head.That was weird, he thinks. 

“Huh,” he says quietly to himself, not sure he’s saying it aloud because he’s not sure of anything right now. 

“What?” Davey asks, voice distant. Like he doesn’t care, while Jade’s having this world-ending revelation. 

“Nothing,” Jade responds, shaking his head. “Just huh. ” His voice is weak. 

Jade swallows again and again, frantically trying to smooth out the knot that’s just gathered and tightened in his throat. He thinks of the boardwalk and swimming at Belmont Park, the way it feels when he neither cleared nor got swept under a wave, instead allowing it to strike him, kicking and spinning and choking on salt and sand, thinking he might drown. Jade was a good swimmer when he was a kid, but every once and awhile he’d fuck up. 

He wants badly to get to the motel and escape Davey, slink into the shower where he can think properly, shoulders red and raw under the thundering weight of hot water for a few blessed seconds before someone screams at him to get out. He steals another glance to the passenger side and finds Davey’s eyes locked on him critically, one brow cocked in mild confusion. 

“Suit yourself,” Davey says and Jade tries hard not to feel capsized. 

“I think I’m getting sick,” He declares. After all, it cannot be what he knows it is. His palms sweat, sliding together on the wheel. “Feel my forehead.” 

Davey’s hand is cool on his brow, laying there lingeringly at his thumb traces along Jade’s temple. “You’re pretty hot. Sure it’s not just from the show? You’re not allowed to get sick on the tour, by the way...” Davey rolls up the window, adding, “your sweat will dry and then you’ll catch a cold.”

Jade’s head is pounding; he sounds like he’s underwater. There is a creeping soreness in his joints, a flu-ache making him feel stiff and exhausted. His body knows that a flu will be easier to deal with than the knowledge that’s beginning to sprout, new and tender, beneath Jade’s diaphragm like some delicate fern, so it protects him by attacking him. 

And sure enough, by the time they get home, Jade’s doubled and sweating over the toilet, as his flesh tries to turn itself inside out and choke out the truth. 

 

~*~

December 1998

They can’t afford cable so everyone in the house watches a lot of movies, piling onto the couch with the ripped upholstery and fighting over which VHS to play. This time it’s just Davey and Jade though, tangled together watching some mobster movie. Jade’s usually good about being boring, but today he’s restless. His skin crawls and he keeps on chasing this traveling itch, from his elbow to his foot to the back of his neck. 

He’s not sure but it could be Davey’s proximity that’s making him nervous. It does that sometimes, and he’s very aware right now of all the places they’re touching, and somehow even more conscious of the places that they’re _not_. Every time Jade’s shifts his weight uneasily to scratch that motherfucking itch, he forces Davey to shuffle and readjust himself. 

“Will you quit? I’m trying to hear everything they’re saying.” Davey gripes.

“Sorry dude. If it’s bothering you there’s like, two whole thirds of the couch you can stretch out on. You know, instead of insisting on the third that I’m trying to occupy.” Jade gestures to the remaining couch cushions to their left, but Davey just leans against him with increased force, their shoulders flush. This predicament is complicated by the fact neither of them are wearing shirts, resulting in the skin that’s touching to stick together with a veneer sweat adhesive. It’s cold outside but the heater works too well, so there’s an oppressive blanket of warmth in the room and nothing to do about it. Except maybe not sit so close together, but Davey isn’t really allowing for that alternative. 

“Nah. I want this spot. Plus, I sat down first,” Davey says curtly, narrowing his eyes and squinting at the TV. 

Jade shakes his head, at a loss for what to say, seeing as the latter part of Davey’s statement is a complete lie. He’s gathered upon himself uncomfortably, too aware of Davey’s body up against his. He half thinks that Davey does this solely to make him uneasy; after all he’s not a fraction as physically affectionate as Davey (no one is, but _especially_ not him,) and Davey should be well aware of this. Regardless, he always goes out of his way to touch Jade, crowd him on the couch, lay his head on his shoulder, grip his elbow in a fist.

It used to freak Jade out but now he’s learned to control himself. Now he hardly notices, unless on days like this when he notices _everything_ in painful detail. Jade can’t think of any other reason Davey might impose his physicality on him, so he gets this feeling that Davey wants to _train_ him, feeding him seed like a bird being taught to be handled. He resents the inherently condescending nature of it, Davey as his handler with some ulterior motive hidden in his touch. Or maybe he resents the way it _works_ , the way it does make him loosen up and relax against it, parakeetlike. Too trusting. 

Davey presses into him again, eyes locked on the TV screen but body moving with clear intention to invade Jade’s space. There’s no way to interpret it as an accident, so Jade finally addresses it. “Dude. Why are you doing that?” He asks, afraid to resist it so instead collapsing under Davey’s weight. 

“Well, you’re letting me,” Davey shrugs, smiling over his shoulder.

Jade scrambles then, feeling like he’s suddenly the one at fault because Davey’s called him on his passivity. Why _is_ he letting Davey bully and touch and manipulate him if he doesn’t somehow like it? Why is he allowing himself to be hand-fed? Why is he so domestic in his cage? Jade feels himself start to sweat even more, his heart thundering. 

“You’re not giving me a choice! You always do this shit, Dave, like you just want to piss me off. Why do you have to always touch me and like, sit on my fucking _lap_...” Jade physically bites his tongue to stop at this point, because he can sense that he’s close to letting something even he hasn’t thought about slip out. The truth behind all of his, the reason why he’s scared. What he’s scared of. What it is that makes him trust Davey as his handler, what turns him into a parakeet. Davey’s looking at him with this gaze of mixed amusement and defiance, and it scares Jade into sputtering silence. 

But it doesn’t scare him as much as what Davey does next, which is reach across Jade’s chest and grab his arm, holding both Jade’s wrists in a surprisingly tough grip, pressing his back to the couch. Jade cannot look at his face, which is only an inch or so away from his own, so instead he focuses on the way Davey’s sinewy biceps are trembling with the effort of holding him down. 

“Let it go,” Davey tells him in a low voice, like he knows what he’s talking about, like he knows all of Jade’s secrets. 

“What are you-” 

“ _Jade_. Let. It. Go.” His eyes flash, and Jade panics. His eyes widen and his mouth opens and closes wordlessly, and every muscle is pulled so heartstring-tight his body sings with pain. He must be wearing all his pain on his face, because Davey looks concerned and pulls back, letting go of that fierce grip and sitting back on his haunches, looking like he lost something. 

Jade takes a breath, realizing he hasn’t done so in awhile. 

“Sorry,” Davey mumbles, voice far away. Jade rubs the bones of his wrists, eyes stinging, all the while thinking that he doesn’t understand a damn thing about Davey, not a damn thing.

Jade shakes for the rest of the movie, and Davey moves to the other end of the couch, leaving Jade to flutter his feathers self-loathingly at the way he misses the traveling itch, the lean of too much weight on his body. 

~*~

January 2000

Jade doesn’t like being vulnerable; he maintains soft spots underneath his exoskeleton. Davey’s innermost thoughts are getting printed on thousands of booklets, ready to be slipped inside the safety of a jewel case, cracked open by dirty hands, pilfered and highlighted and underlined and footnoted and marked up in the margins. Analyzed by the world. Jade does not understand how he does it. 

It’s because of this that Jade never asks Davey what his songs are about. He feels guilty enough that all the kids who buy the record are trying to find out. Even though Davey’s told him, (his cheeks slightly flushed one late night when they talked like talking was a race,) that he _likes_ it, that he’s perversely obsessed with the idea of so many people reading a map to his soul, trying to make sense of the directions, struggling without a key. That he doesn’t exactly want them to know, but he wants them to try. 

Still, Jade doesn’t. Not too hard, anyway. This is not his place. 

Or so he says. He says this, in spite of all the times Davey has reminded him, _I want you to need me. You can always talk to me_. In spite of the fact Jade is his _writing partner_ , that this is his art, too.

But Jade thinks he might be projecting. Jade frequently thinks he’s projecting, which is another reason why he doesn’t try and understand the lyrics too hard. He’s aware that that every word Davey writes, he will read through the lens of his _own_ perception, his own futile hope, his own obsession. 

Because at this point, Jade is fairly certain that he’s obsessed with Davey. 

There is no other explanation for why 90 percent of his thoughts somehow can be traced back to Davey, as if he is the Nile River and Jade is constructed of all these tiny deltas and streams that branch and branch but eventually lead back to him. Emptying into this greater body of water, something fast and raging and dirty and huge. Something Jade could drown in. 

He cannot stop thinking about him. Whenever they’re apart, Jade just thinks about when they’re going to be together again, when his world will stop being meaningless and quiet and completely uninteresting. When color will seep back into his surroundings and he’ll start to feel unhinged again, broken open. And that’s what Davey does, the motherfucker: he unhinges Jade. Cracks him along a seam he didn’t know he had and rushes inside. He leaves Jade sitting and swaying and clutching his forearm, wondering how on earth he existed before this, how he lived without being broken apart. How he tolerated his flesh without knowing someone who shared the same abhorrence for it. 

And what’s more is that he wants to do the same. He wants to shatter Davey into fragments and piece him back together, he wants his vision to be interrupted by the cage of Davey’s rib bones. 

He’s doesn’t think this necessarily means he’s in love with Davey. Perhaps artistically in love with him, but that’s different. But still, he wants to be everything to him. He wants to be the _you_ in half of Davey’s songs. 

This is why he can’t analyze the lyrics, this is why he doesn’t highlight or mark up the margins. 

Because he’s terrified it’ll read how he wants it to read. And he’s terrified it won’t. 

He knew it would be like his. He _knew_ that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from being swept away in the current if they started writing together. He knew he wouldn’t be able to withstand the motion of the steadily turning earth, shifting along its axis as day turned to night and back again. 

Jade is the kind of guy who digs his heels into the bank of the river, who holds onto fists of lake-weed to keep himself from moving. Jade resists change.

But here he is, not reading Davey’s lyrics and marking his calendar by the days he was unhinged. He isn’t syncing up with his own concept of himself, and that’s a testament of change, proving there isn’t a damn thing he can do to keep for Nile from surging on, to keep the world from turning, to keep the music they write from changing them. Changing him. 

Jade spends a lot of time biting his lip, keeping himself from saying shit to Davey. He wants to tell him, _I think I’ve gotten too close to you_ , but instead he remains mute and unmoving, watching while Davey writes down this encoded shit he won’t let himself understand, and a leaky faucet drips somewhere in the background.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Davey kissing anyone and everyone is one of my favorite canonical bits of lore.

December 1999

Jade dreams about Davey sometimes. He doesn’t think this is too strange, (he lives with him after all, and people dream about those they spend the most time around, right?) until one particular dream sticks to the inside of his ribs, coming back again and again throughout the day. It’s like something Jade wished he hadn’t eaten, some subtle consumed poison he can’t puke out that’s making him half-sick, life-nauseous. He tries to convince himself it’s a dream he could have had about anyone, (which is true, but then it might not bother him so much.) After all, its not a sex dream or anything. 

In it, a lot happens that doesn’t have to do with Davey. First Jade’s at Bass Lake, in a mountain cabin he went to with his parents some childhood summer. In the dream it’s not summer though... spring, maybe, with the way the bearclover and sour grass are blooming and everything hums with insects. He’s trying to tell his mom that he didn’t do It, Smith did, but he can’t remember what It is. Then he’s at Berkeley on the last day before spring break, and he’s forgotten to finish something and his ride home has already left. But Davey rushes to him and says he’ll drive him home if he hurries his ass up. 

And it’s Davey the way Davey looked in 1993, his fucked-up, stupid blondish hair and Chain of Strength sweatshirt, behind the wheel of his piece of shit red truck. And it’s spring and he has a green apple on his lap and somehow, Jade’s behind him, fingers on the back of his neck rubbing insistently and telling him _thank you_ , and we’ll get there on time.

And that in and of itself isn’t that weird. Not really. 

But one second there’s the fiercely, relentlessly vivid warmth of Davey’s dream-skin against Jade’s dream-fingers, and then Jade’s stirring awake from the weight of sleep and he is so, overwhelmingly blissful he fights the oncoming tide of light and messy room that’s solidifying around him just so he can spend one more second touching Dream-Davey.

Jade manages to shake off that weird, glowing happiness from his gut the minute he realizes what he’s doing, and kind of freaks out. The whole thing irks him, embarrasses him, throws itself against him with enough force that his ribs ache for the remainder of the day, and he has a bitter taste in the back of his throat. 

A bitter taste that sweetens whenever he accidentally recalls that buzzing spring-sound, the green apple, and the topmost knob of Davey’s spine warm like May. 

He keeps on biting his lip, startling himself out of the spring and back to the grey of December and the shitty coffee he made, black and acrid like gasoline. This deliberate physical punishment compounded with the surges of nausea that push his stomach into a twisted shape manage to make him forget the dream for the next few days. Jade almost sleeps soundly. 

But then, he has another one. In it they’re lying together on an air-mattress on the floor of Jade’s old dorm room like quotation marks. Davey’s back creates this perfect map of white skin for Jade to look at, angled and silent against forever-blackness like a ghost’s circus tent. He wakes from that one with an uncontrolled starving-sensation of regret, like he wishes he could have reached out and traced that laddered spine.

And then there’s another. This time it’s Davey sitting on the foot of his bed, telling Jade with a weird, high-school urgency that he has to show him something. The most memorable part of the dream is Jade’s terror and apprehension that whatever this work of art is, (and he _knows_ that it’s art, or at least through Davey’s eyes), it will send him into an orbit he can’t handle. He’s pretty certain that Davey is about two seconds away from rolling up the sleeve of his sweatshirt and showing him some scabbed map of shit he thinks is art. A self-constructed cross-hatching of things needing to be healed. That, or a broken mirror, and Jade’s not sure which series of fervent, hysteric lines of interrupted surface will be worse. 

Jade wakes up gasping before Davey can produce either. 

It disturbs Jade for a long time, the image his mind creates of Davey open and bleeding. It makes him paranoid, and for a day or so following the dream he starts every time he sees Davey, heart leaping in his throat and hands crazy with the overwhelming need to grab him, roll up his sweatshirt sleeve, and make sure he’s not going to exsanguinate. 

Avoiding sleep seems like a safe way to deal with it, so Jade brews a pot of coffee every night at ten thirty. All this does is give him stomach aches and constant jitteriness, and it certainly doesn’t make him quit thinking about Davey, who doesn’t sleep either. Now they just spend more hours awake together, more hours writing and talking through sunrise in hoarse voices about art, and the future, and the things that scare them. 

When Jade finally does nod off, he dreams he’s holding Davey’s shoulders against a wall in the shared bathroom, between the two towel racks. And one second there’s space between them everywhere like a layer of rain on the pavement after a storm, and the next second there isn’t anymore. Their lips touch, and then they _more_ than touch, so they’re wet and sealed with pressure and the feeling of something fitting, something searing. 

It’s terribly vivid.

But the worst part about it is that Jade’s not even fully asleep yet. He’s suspended in that uncomfortable in-between space, mind racing and flooding with somewhat uncontrolled images he can’t fully blame on his subconscious. He jolts out of his almost-dream, beside Davey on his infuriatingly narrow twin mattress, while his own air-mattress is empty on the floor. 

It makes him think of this time the summer before he went to Berkeley, when he was eighteen and a bad driver. He hit a guy on his bike where State St. intersected Perkins. He remembers feeling the terrible wave of panic when he thought he killed him, followed by a feeling of overwhelming, spreading relief when the guy got up and yelled at him, a little scraped up but otherwise alive. It was terrifying, that feeling, but not as bad as this. 

Dreaming about kissing a man scares him more than almost _killing_ one, and that doesn’t sit right, not even to Jade, who lets his fear take the wheel and drive him home on most days. He takes deep breaths, waiting for that cascade of relief that follows terror, but it never comes. 

Spring and someone’s back are easy enough to ignore, and art and mirrors less so, but kissing is an entirely different issue. He thinks of Davey cut open, and why that sticks with him so much, and wonders if it’s because he wants to-- and perhaps always has wanted to-- crawl inside that opening and stay. Or, if he wants to press the places where he himself is cut open to those on Davey, which is somehow almost the _same thing_ as kissing. 

Jade lies awake for a long time, listening to the unsteady in and out of Davey’s fitful half-sleep beside him. Part of him is scared to leave, part of him is scared to stay. But in spite of these two halves warring inside his one body, the whole of Jade is warmed by his proximity to Davey’s fever-hot skin, and the whole of him burns against the bed. And even though Jade knows this can’t happen, his air-mattress remains empty on the floor.

 

~*~

December 1999

There’s a lot of things Davey does that drive Jade crazy. One of them is kissing _everyone_ , especially if they clearly want it, or clearly do not. Davey uses his lips to be punk, uses his body as a political statement. Jade thinks there’s a certain kind of admirable poetry to this, especially because he knows Davey views bodies as a complex system of cursed roots holding him landlocked while the sea bashes itself against the surrounding earth. Davey’s making the best out of a bad situation when he kisses people. Perhaps its better than what he’d do otherwise, what Jade does. 

Jade knows from experience that Davey’s instinct is to destroy, yet he’s using that loathing to create. That’s more than Jade can say on most days, between his forearm and his sweatband and the constant, hungry ache he gives into time and time again, when he knows he’s alone and scars don’t matter anyway. 

So maybe he should congratulate Davey on his wayward kisses, on the way he grabs the biggest guy in the pit and presses their mouths together after a set at a hardcore show. Davey’s eyes will be closed and streaked in sweat and kohl, and the guy will thrash out of his grip, floored and horrified, saggy earlobes swinging without their tunnels. And every time, Davey could get the shit kicked out of him. But every time, he does it anyway. 

It’s tough. It’ extraordinarily punk. It’s Davey giving a shit but acting like he doesn’t, which is braver than not caring at all because he knows the risk. It’s Davey being brave and stupid and reckless for the sake of what he believes in, while Jade cowers in the corner with his head between his knees and his skin shredded in so many hidden places. 

At the very least Jade should be self-deprecating over it. Acknowledge his weakness and take it as a personal failure, move on. But whenever Davey head-crawls across the sea of swaying kids and finds a boy to kiss, taking that face surely between his hands and adhering two mouths, Jade doesn’t just feel weak. He feels jealous, leaping inside like a parabolic function. Singing somewhere inside and thinking against his every instinct, _I wish that I did not wish that was me._

If it was only for the statement, only to piss people off, it might be something Jade could handle. But its more than that. Davey loves other people and wants to be loved by other people, showing his affection the way a normal person would: kisses, hugs, lap-sitting, all that valentines bullshit Jade can’t bring himself to do casually, frivolously. Not when there’s this sick, thrumming ache inside of him every time he watches Davey.

He almost doesn’t want to go to shows with him anymore because he knows he’ll be forced to witness the kissing, Davey’s peaked lips split and wet over some unsuspecting other mouth. And Jade’s still not entirely sure of the magnitude of such thoughts, but every time, what crosses his mind is _I want to be more than your statement. I want you to kiss me because you want to kiss me, not to piss people off. And I’d kiss you back, Dave. I would._

 

~*~

October 1999

It’s been pouring rain for six days straight, and Jade can’t sit still anymore by Wednesday, so he takes a walk with this shitty umbrella they never use because its not supposed to _rain_ in California. By the time he makes it to a top of the block, the thing’s closed on him, encasing his shivering body in collapsed, rain-slicked nylon. He tosses it in a dumpster behind the liquor store on the corner, dragging himself and his surrounding puddle inside to see if he can buy a new one. 

He leaves the house largely because Davey is driving him insane. It’s not even like he’s _doing_ anything, really. It’s just the way he leaves the wet towels on Jade’s air mattress so the sheets aren’t dry when Jade finally goes to sleep. Or the way he refuses to take the trash out in the kitchen they all share, because he won’t touch the beer cans. Or the way he turns inexplicably moody and locks himself in their room with music blasting, so he can’t hear when Jade knocks to get his shoes or wallet or whatever. In short, Davey’s a selfish bastard with no regard to the people he’s living with. Especially Jade, who he’s _really_ living with. 

 

So as Jade pushes open the door to the liquor store and finds Davey in there, chatting up some girl and thumbing through tattoo magazines, he freezes. He watches Davey laugh and smile and steal the light in the room, and he tries to evoke the familiar feeling of self-righteous irritation in his chest but nothing comes, nothing but this falling-feeling. Davey looks like the only real thing Jade’s seen since the rain started, and everything else has been moving pictures, smoke, and reflections. 

He left the house to get away from Davey, and here he is. His existence is constantly invading Jade’s life, even when he tries to get away. 

Last weekend Jade went to visit his family back in Ukiah, just an impulse trip because he was starting to go too crazy. Davey had called him relentlessly during his absence, begging him to return because everyone else was stupid and drunk and didn’t clean the kitchen. But upon Jade’s arrival back home Davey had been weird, hot and cold and oddly aloof. 

And here he is, ignoring Jade and talking to this girl with her cherry-red bob and snake bites. Unzipping his faded black hoodie to tug down the neck of his Dead Can Dance shirt, revealing the nautical stars tattoos on his collar bones like the stars of Orion’s Belt, stars sailors look to so they can navigate home. Jade stares and stares and feels like he’s going fucking crazy. Like he’s falling. 

That’s how its been lately: like falling. Like sailing. Sick stomachs and sea legs and a constant motion Jade resists. He’s not sure why, but Davey’s existence makes things hard to stomach; it incites a technicolor whir around Jade, and he feels like he’s holding fistfuls of anything he can reach, just to keep himself from taking off, swept away by Davey’s flood-like motion. He’s a flood, and Jade can’t swim. 

Jade slinks back out into the rain before Davey notices him. After all, it feels like they’re fighting, although Jade doesn’t know why. He knows its something bigger than the fact Davey’s a selfish prick and is annoying to share a room with. It’s something that’s Jade’s fault, some separation between them that’s probably imagined, probably self-imposed. 

But Davey’s always elsewhere, at the gym or skating with Nick, rushing and surging between people while Jade sticks a nervous toe in at the bank, deciding it’s too cold. Jade hates the distance that’s sprung between them, but does nothing to shorten it, instead running out to the rain while Davey makes new friends or gets girls numbers or whatever the fuck he’s doing right now. 

Jade’s not out there two minutes before his cell phone rings, the vibration of it in his pocket startling him. His hair drips as he answers with an irritated “Hello?” 

“What the fuck,” Davey’s voice says. 

“What?!” 

“You came in, then you saw me and left. What’s your problem, dude? I would have walked back with you, you didn’t even have an umbrella.” There’s a weird, keening desperation to Davey’s voice, like he’s racing to prove something. It makes Jade’s insides slither, his fingers tighten cold and involuntary on his clunky cell phone, slick with rain.

“I wanted to be alone,” Jade half lies. 

“Why?” Davey pushes, _always_ pushing. 

Sighing, Jade says “Dave, you’ve been driving me insane lately. You gotta stop putting your towels on my bed, and slacking on your trash duty, and...” Jade tries to make this about something stupid and external, but he can’t even muster real anger. 

“...So you left because you didn’t want to see me?” Davey responds in this way that makes Jade feel like he knows that he’s bluffing. That it’s quite the contrary, that he _wants_ to be pissed off over the towel, but can’t make himself care. 

“No...no I’m sorry. I just didn’t want to interrupt you,” Jade argues stupidly, now standing stationary in the middle of the fucking sidewalk while the sky rains on him. “You looked busy.” 

“Jesus _Christ_ , Jade” Davey says, sounding a little crazy and too shrill. “If you keep trying not to bother me, you’re really gonna start bothering me. I wish you’d stop being so goddamn selfless. I didn’t even know you cared about the towels, you know? You gotta ask for stuff. You have to take, or else I’m never gonna know.” 

Jade is silent at the darkness there would be in Davey’s voice right now, if Davey’s voice had a color.

“Okay, well I’l telling you now,” he finally says lamely. “Pick up your towels. And get over your prissy straightedge self and take out the trash, the rest of us suck it up.” It’s pouring even harder now, an almost painful onslaught that’s making Jade’s skin sting. He’s surprised by this conversation; his stomach is still lurching from Davey asking him to _take_. 

Davey laughs, and it crackles through Jade’s phone. “Alright. That’s better. I like you when you’re not selfless. Except you’re never selfless, not really... you act like you don’t need me, but you totally do, you just won’t ask because you’re too proud or some shit,” his voice is rapid fire now, like gunshots. 

“Stay where you are, you stupid fuck. I’m coming to get you,” Davey sighs wearily. 

They walk home together, Davey’s arm hooked within Jades, his eyes dark and concerned like _he’s_ the one enduring the company of a crazy person. Jade wants to ask him what he’s thinking, what he means, but he can’t make his mouth work, a huge knot of lonely frustration forming in his throat, silencing him and clouding his eyes with a veneer of unshed salt water.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So many existential meanderings in the mind of Jade Puget.

May 2000

There are two voices in an otherwise empty space, these things not quite separate and almost touching between the heavy shadows of Davey’s unlit bedroom. They’re both sleeping in his bed, even though Jade has a perfectly good one himself, down the hall. 

Davey’s curtains block out any ambitious moonlight and he bunched up dirty clothes along the crack of the door to keep the hall light from seeping onto his carpet, so even after their eyes adjust they’re still blind. It’s easier this way somehow, to lie side by side and talk about stuff that’s hard to talk about when it’s black and they cannot see each other’s eyes. 

Out of the dark, a voice says, “I was most fucked up my junior year at Berkeley. All my friends were abroad, and I didn’t live on campus...it was easy to be isolated, to just spiral. No one noticed.” 

The other voice responds, “That’s funny, because I was most fucked up my first semester of school.” 

“Your only semester of school.” 

“Shut up. It was also my first. Anyway, we were fucked up at the same time and didn’t know it. It’s weird, that we were lying in separate beds in the same city wanting to die and never knew about it.” 

“I _did_ just lie in bed. Bullshitting papers the morning they were due, not doing my readings, skipping class, and...” Jade’s hand itches to touch his forearm, but the fingers he wants to use to trace old scars are laying carefully against Davey’s elbow, so he keeps them there. They’re quiet together in tacit understanding, unable to give words to this thing that ties them together. 

“...Yeah, me too. Just slept all day. Then I’d wake up after dark and be so fucking scared of how directionless I felt...you know, not wanting to be at school, but hating the idea of home, listening to music that seemed so much better than anything I could write, knowing I was an artist, but not a good enough artist to make it... Just stuck.” The voice stops, letting the word _stuck_ hang in the weighty darkness. Then, it picks up again, quieter as it says, “So I’d hurt myself, because what else can you do? Where can it go? What the fuck else do you do when you’re stuck, when your body can’t _contain_ everything?” 

Jade is quiet, thinking that Davey is, and has always been, a good enough artist to make it. He wants to tell him that but not with the pads of his fingers against his elbow. That seems too much somehow, so he stays silent for a moment, then says instead: “something’s gotta give, when you’re stuck.” 

“Exactly. But what kind of existence is that, lying in bed bleeding? Something _else_ has to give, eventually, if you don’t kill yourself,” Davey whispers. 

They can hear each other breathing. Jade feels like he’s at sea, and wants to say Davey’s name. 

“I’m sorry... I wish I had known how unhappy you were. I would have found you. I mean, I had no idea. I was too busy lying in my own bed bleeding.” Jade means it, too. He imagines himself at age twenty-one, stoned and self-hating and scarred, crawling in between Davey’s blood-stained sheets and holding him. Stuck together.

“Nah dude, don’t feel bad. You didn’t really know me then. And you lived off campus, right? Plus, if I hadn’t sunk that low, I wouldn’t be able to write the things I write now. It was kind of necessary, even though it fucking sucked.”

Jade knows he’s right, because this is true about himself, too. To be an artist is to withstand incredible amounts of pain and survive. If there’s no pain, then there’s nothing but chords and riffs and notes and words, listed on a page in ink instead of blood. It’s Jade’s demons that have written songs, and he knows Davey well enough to assume the same of him. 

“I know. As shitty as that year was, I wouldn’t take it back. And I _would_ do it over again. ...I guess I would just find you, second time around.” 

Davey sighs, sounding moved, and his elbow fits itself more closely inside Jade’s palm. The skin is soft and warm, and his blind, black world narrows to the feeling of Davey’s pulse under his fingers. Jade wishes he could say _you’re the person today because of the pain I couldn’t save you from. And I’m in love with the person you are today._

But whether or not Davey’s pulse is in his hands, that somehow seems like too much. Regardless, Jade is content, and reserves himself to the knowledge that this is better than sex, better than anything, and he can live with just this. Davey’s blood (miraculous, still in his body) flickering against Jade’s palm. 

~*~  
March 2000

And that’s the thing. The way Jade feels about Davey...it doesn’t matter. He can think of a few very good reasons, (and then one not-so-good, but still very real reason) why the strength of his obsession to be near Davey and understand him wholly _does not matter_ and _should not_ change anything between them. 

The first legitimate reason is that Jade has been disappointed by enough sex and enough failed relationships to know that any sort of romantic reality with another human being is just that: reality. Two humans fucking each other and then fucking each other up and then moving on, base and animal and entirely _disappointing_. The sonnets he read in college about idealistic beauty in love, fourteen lines of perfect, preserved soul exchange whose only true enemy was the inevitable force of death...that’s all bullshit. 

Idealized love is a myth that’s been around even _before_ those 17th century sonnets, and Jade knows that really, when stripped of its poetry, connection is nothing but a wasteland: barren sightless moors stretching out for miles before the throne of The Fisher King. Animals fucking. Animals dying. 

In Jade’s head, it wouldn’t be this way with Davey. But of course, Jade knows that whatever he imagines fucking and loving Davey will be like, the imagined version will _always_ be better than the way it really is, and he will be disappointed yet again. The way college disappointed him, the way the city disappointed him, the way his stupid fucking pointless degree disappointed him. The way all of these realities paled when juxtaposed with the idealized versions of them he’d created. 

Jade believes that perception is _better_ than reality; this notion is all he _has_ as an artist. He can think of at least five separate conversations he’s had with Davey about this very subject, the hundreds of times they’ve agreed that one of the reasons they love music is that any lyrical and auditory representation of sensation and feeling will _always be better_ than the feeling itself, and that’s how catharsis works. That’s the power one adopts as a writer. 

The only _real_ feeling is what Jade’s in control of, what’s _more_ than perception because it is his own, self-fabricated reality. Scars, for example. Or, the feeling that drives the hand to move the thing that creates the scar. That kind of self contained-control will never disappoint, because Jade can always go deeper. He can always reopen old wounds. It’s his own hand. 

So Jade knows that fucking Davey, even if he loves him, will never be as good as he can imagine it. It will never be as good as the scars, because those are by _his_ hand, not someone else’s hand, someone else’s mouth or dick or whatever. Jade would have to surrender his control, and that’s an impossibility. 

It’s complicated, because Jade’s never actually feels separate from Davey the way he feels separate from most reality, but he knows that’s all a part of his perception, too. Relating to someone always is. Jade doesn’t _actually_ know Davey, he just wishes he does, craves it, so naturally he thinks it’ll be different with him. Naturally he thinks that Davey understands _I can connect/ nothing with nothing_ in the exact, same, pure, true way that _he_ does. 

It’s an illusion of perception. Just like the perfect sex they won’t have, just like the sprouts of deceptive green pushing their heads above the cracked earth of the wasteland. 

Jade doesn’t want to be disappointed. He doesn’t want to lose control. He’d rather sit with what he _perceives_ Davey’s lyrics are about. He’d rather imagine that if he and Davey were together it would be perfect, while knowing that if they _actually_ were, it wouldn’t be. 

He can connect, nothing with nothing. He and Davey _both_ connect nothing with nothing. Which kind of shakes Jade’s whole belief system that all connection is imagined and perceived, but whatever. All the more reason to _not_ go through with falling in love with Davey, because they already have something beautiful. It would be a shame to ruin the connection-over-nothing with something as base as sex, when it can be a sonnet in Jade’s head. 

And that is the first reason. He can imagine it better than it will be, and because Jade believes in art, he believes in this. It seems infallible, especially when coupled with the second reason, which is as follows: 

Before Davey, Jade’s relationships were characterized by dependance. He either depended on her or she depended on him in such an imbalanced fashion one sucked the other dry, draining them to a wasteland where nothing meaningful could grow. Jade thinks that he might have loved these girls, in some sense of the word love. But how he feels about Davey is different. 

Jade used to think love was pain. After all, he was a cynic and a Joy Division fan and had his heart broken at age seventeen by some girl who didn’t know his name. And following that, every other girl broke him too, in some way or another. Love _hadn’t_ felt good, it _hadn’t been_ sonnets and ideals and spring. The way Jade sees it in his mind’s eye, the loves of his past featured him as a fragmented soul, leaning on another fragmented soul and trying to fit together the broken edges like puzzle pieces to see if they clicked into place. Trying to construct a whole out of different tattered, ill-fitting parts. 

The things he remembers feeling good about this kind of love were all relational. He felt good when he took care of her, when she reinforced his role as her boyfriend. He felt good when she took care of him, when he could see she was willing to sacrifice her own well being for his. That continuous ceding of one’s happiness in exchange for the other’s....Jade thinks this is love, for a long time. It seems so real he doesn’t even realize that he sees himself as less than a whole, as a chipped mirror reflecting someone else’s incomplete self. 

But with Davey, everything changes. The way Jade loves Davey (even in a purely platonic way, even when they were just _friends_ ) is as his whole self, loving Davey’s whole self. He doesn’t view Davey as a complimentary asset to his own broken down shell of humanity. He sees Davey, and loves Davey, as Davey is. Complete (or incomplete) and _not_ in relation to Jade. 

The most valuable thing about all of this is that in loving Davey as a whole, separate from himself, Jade is forced to see himself as a whole, too. Or at least, something yearning to be whole, but not to be completed _by_ someone else. Fragments shored against _his own_ ruins, not the jagged beach of someone else’s quarry. 

When Jade realizes this, he’s a little bit disgusted with himself. It all seems terribly new-agey and dumb, something the hippy kids in Berkeley selling their hemp keychains on Telegraph tell him about. That one is only capable of love in their own entirety. Wholeness, self-efficacy and all that bullshit. He doesn’t _want_ to believe in wholeness, or even the possibility of it. But Jade’s cynicism and appreciation for Joy Division drain the sunny, flower-child lameness out of it. The way Jade sees it, he’s still a wasteland. And so is Davey. 

But he’s not a wasteland looking for someone else to till his soil...he’s planting the seeds _himself_. And so is Davey. He’s carving his _own_ scars. 

And so is Davey. And this is why he loves him. 

So Jade can live with never acting on it, he can live with his love being unrequited. It won’t kill him, it won’t hold off the spring or fuck up the rhyme in that final couplet. There is no final couplet; he connects nothing with nothing and in the end, he’s still a (fragmented)whole loving another (fragmented)whole. It doesn’t matter if anything physical happens to validate it, it doesn’t matter is Davey feels the same way. 

Maybe it makes him sad for a few days (months), but ultimately, Jade is satisfied with this. He’s weirdly happy to be in love with Davey, even though it’s useless and unrequited and futile and fully perceived instead of realized. He loves him, and that’s enough. Nothing changes that way, he can remain blissfully static, ignorant, and safe. 

After all, the reality won’t live up to the perception, but the reality will destroy the perception. Jade would rather stay the Fisher King, frozen and infertile and dictating his own pain into his own forearm, while Davey writes his manifestos and bleeds quietly from the same places, in the same city, a different bed. 

~*~  
April 2000

He tells himself it’s better this way. He even believes it, some days. 

But then, there’s that third, not-so-good reason. The one that might be the reason Jade’s even thought of the other two. 

Because the truth is, Jade might love Davey in that base, animal way that humans feel for other humans. Jade might not _care_ that the reality will be a disappointment when compared to the imagined version, because those three seconds before he comes in Davey’s mouth will be worth the years of disappointment afterwards. Unrequited denial might _not_ be enough. Jade might not be more than a man, might not be a hero of art. 

In fact, he is so much less than all of that. When it comes down to it, the real driving force behind Jade’s stasis is fear. 

It’s easy to disguise inactivity as appreciation for art, when really, under everything, he’s just scared. Scared of the disappointment, the rejection, the inevitable shattering of ideals into fourteen lines of rhythm posing as poetry. 

The truth is that Jade is scared of being with Davey because it might not live up to his idealized perception of it, but he’s _terrified_ , beyond all reason or logic, that it actually _will_. 

Because honestly, if two people know how to connect nothing with nothing, is there the possibility that their connection will be the _only thing_ that’s _something?_ Jade doesn’t _know,_ and he’s the kind of guy who likes to be _sure_ about things before he jumps headlong into them. 

Davey, on the other hand jumps first and asks questions later, Davey kisses strangers and uses his body as warfare in order to swallow that he’s at war with his body. Davey doesn’t wonder if he’s more than a man, Davey _knows_ he’s an animal, so he spends all his time finding ways to trick the rest of the world into not knowing what he knows, and believing he’s a god. 

And he’s never told Jade these things, Jade just _knows._ From watching, from understanding, from connecting. And that, could that be more than perception? Is the mere fact he understands Davey _as a whole_ separate from himself proof that it’s _not_ just perception and imagined ideals and relations, but true, authentic connection? Nothing with Nothing? The question marks, in and of themselves _should_ be enough for Jade to _try_ , if he was a real hero. Of art, or of love, because whose to say love isn’t just as much a medium as paints or clay or words?

But Jade is a coward. Jade wants things to stay the way they are, Jade’s worried about getting swept away, he’s worried about the depth of life that could grow raging and longing from his wasteland if he plants a single fucking seed. He likes it to be barren, that way he can set his lands in order. He can see what’s really important. Like art. And self preservation. And pain by his own hand. _That_ is why Jade withstands motion. Because above all...above love and sex and even Art...Jade values control. 

And he wishes this was enough. He wishes sometimes that Davey didn’t have his own free will, and didn’t have the capability to make his own decisions, and break down his own walls, and conquer his own fears. He’s almost-- almost-- sure it’s unrequited, but there are the times Davey’s eyes get heavy and dark and critical, and Jade feels a muted shock of sadness grip his larynx when that gaze meets his own, like they both know. And Jade becomes paralyzed with the fear that no matter how much _he_ controls himself, Davey might just up and take what he wants, if he wants it. 

And like the only pomegranate growing in the whole, entire wasteland, Jade will be red and raw and ripe for the picking, because he’s _not_ an artist...he’s not a hero. He’s just a man, just an animal, and he wants things, too.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO MANY MODERNIST POETS I am sorry everyone I don't even like modernism as much as this story does. Thank you for reading. This is the last chapter! I hope you all enjoyed this story. It’s about the Art of Drowning. Which I always thought was really, “The Art of Falling in Love.” Because how can an artist do it (fall in love, I mean) if they don’t see it as an art? What do you guys think? Think I’m crazy? But really! Drowning. It makes sense to me, the surrender and the death and the faithlessness implied in the word. I hope you all agree. Davey and Jade (in this story, I mean) seem to.
> 
> Ugh, poetry references. I’d encourage you all to read The Wasteland, but honestly, It’s pretty indecipherable without a professor, and more honestly, don’t waste your time. Waste your time on this instead. It has more porn in it. Though I don’t own it, and it never happened.

May 2000

It’s Sunday Morning and Davey and Jade are sharing coffee and oranges in celebration. It’s Sunday morning at two am, though, so the house is quiet and the sun has hours before it rises, but regardless it feels somehow meaningful. They’ve just finished writing a song and Jade is ready to burst with wild, unashamed and sleep deprived elation, which is surging in his chest and making him feel dizzy, weightless, impossible. They’re talking about nature and the way Eucalyptus smells in April, and Davey’s eyes keep on locking and lingering on Jade’s, like he’s looking past their color and dilation in search of some important undercurrent. 

It makes Jade’s stomach drop and his hands feel cold while the rest of him feels warm. He uses his guitar-long thumbnail to peel a third orange, eyes cutting to the pieces he’s pulling off and piling on the black denim of the jeans he wore that day, folded neatly beside him now that he’s stripped down to his boxers. The orange peel is the brightest thing in Davey’s room, so it should be easier for Jade to keep its eyes trained on it, but they keep on sliding back to Davey, Davey’s smile and his vague, puzzled look when he tries to explain the beauty of blooming things without sounding lame. 

“I mean, it’t not the new flowers that’re beautiful, its the dead shit around it. You know, how meaning is defined by absence, and, uh, spring is defined by the fact it follows winter,” he says, gesturing with a segment of orange in his hands like a fraction of a globe, uneaten and unimportant when there’s something like absence to explain. 

“No, I know. Rebirth is meaningless without death preceding it,” Jade mumbles, shocked by his own eloquence. It’s only because he’s been thinking about this a lot, thinking about the wasteland’s stagnancy, a scorched landscape just _waiting_ for the Fisher King to die before it can bloom. Because it’s been on his mind it comes out fully formed, and Davey chokes on his coffee. 

“That was beautifully put,” he says hoarsely once he swallows. His words carry weight with them, that same scrutinizing weight as his gaze, and Jade feels his sternum heat up. 

“I’ve been thinking about _The Wasteland_ a lot again for some reason,” Jade shrugs. “So the whole landscape-death thing has been on my mind.”

“Ew, _The Wasteland_ ” Davey nods, sounding unimpressed. Then he cocks his head, finally eating the orange segment he’d been gesturing with and chewing it thoughtfully. “I like the poem okay, language wise, but I don’t relate to it at all.” 

Jade perks up, eyes widening. And this was what he was looking for. Proof of perceived connection, not actual connection. Davey didn’t understand. Maybe he _didn’t_ connect nothing with nothing, and there was no connection at all. Just nothing. “Really?! But its so...it’s so...”

“It’s so pretentious with all the allusion, dude. Plus, I’m not that kind of person,” Davey interrupts, shaking his head. “The end? It totally ruins the whole poem for me. I like the majority of it, obviously.” 

“Well yeah, it’s all about sex and death and meaninglessness. Your three favorite topics,” Jade says quietly through a mouthful of orange. Davey laughs and it makes Jade feel explosive and crazy, this filling-to-the-point-of-overflow sensation that threatens to tear Jade along his weakly sewn seams. It’s not a feeling that’s good or bad; it’s somewhere between two absolutes, which strikes Jade as funny because it’s very late at night, he’s exhausted, and everything _about_ this and Davey and him is absolute. 

“And don’t forget subversion of religion! My other favorite,” Davey jokes, eyes still crinkled at the corners like folded tissue paper. “Honestly though, that arrogant bastard fucks it up in the end...the solution he offers for escape from the wasteland is _selflessness_ , remember?” 

Jade snorts. “Oh yeah, you would hate that. Uh, compassion, self-control, and the capability to give, I think is what he says.” As he finishes, his mouth goes dry, because he doesn’t want to imagine himself as someone who relates to these values, as someone whose salvation is self-control. It’s decidedly un-punk. 

“Yeah, giving. I hate that,” Davey says emphatically, getting on all fours from his lazy cross-legged slouch and crawling onto the mattress. He curls up. “I vastly prefer taking to giving.” His eyes are so dark Jade thinks he might be imagining them. 

“Well yeah. It’s easier that way,” Jade lies in a raw voice. 

“No, not always,” Davey swallows audibly, and the shadows in the room seem to cling to him, making his face unreadable and his eyes all-pupil. “Self control is super fucking easy a lot of the time, dude. The easiest thing in the world. It just depends on the circumstance.”

Jade doesn’t like how carefully Davey is choosing his words. He watches him unravel from his cat-curl, then stretch so that his hem inches up, a strip of kissably pale skin appearing warm and white between his pants and his Samhain shirt. There is something racing inside of Jade, tick-ticking away too fast and expanding in his chest and he can’t breathe, and all he can do is lick his own dry lips and wish it wasn’t so late. 

It seems strange that he’s still sitting by the orange peels and empty coffee cups when Davey is in his bed, dirty hair on dirty pillow and hands tangled in the sheets. He forces himself to get closer, so he’s laying on the narrow mattress with Davey and their bodies are near to one another like things caught in a magnetized orbit. 

Air thrums around and between them, and Davey looks very expectant. So Jade forces himself to talk. “I don’t actually think Eliot believes that you can really escape from the wasteland...I think he offers all that touchy-feely giving and compassion shit, but in the end, you’re still stuck there. It only provides some kind of _temporary_ salvation,” He says, trying to remember why he loves this poem, what his professor said in his years-ago Modern Poetry class. 

“Eh, I know,” Davey sighs, rolling from his back to his side, so their faces are close in this way that suggests longing in its empty space. Meaning defined by absence. “But personally, I think there are much better places to find temporary salvation. Much better than _self control_.” 

“Like what, death?” Jade asks, because he knows from his lyrics that Davey regards death very highly in terms of salvation. And because its an easier to swallow answer than any of the other things Davey might suggest, like _taking_ , or _this_ or _You_. 

Davey laughs, and Jade gets that explosive, too-tight-to-breathe feeling again. “Well yeah, _ultimately,_ death...but death is too much. I guess I always feel like in terms of salvation, death is something you have to earn, you know? When you’ve found what you’re looking for, or explained yourself artisically. Um...when you’ve found some kind of temporary salvation _life_...” He explains, brow furrowed like he’s not sure he’s saying it right. 

But he is. It’s so raw. It’s not fair. It’s too much. It’s everything Jade’s ever thought but couldn’t put words to, because words are not his medium. Right there, in Davey’s voice, printed on both of their chests in newsprint, of both of their arms in wounds. 

Jade can’t breathe but he says anyway, “No, I get what you’re saying.” His voice is hoarse with awe. 

And things change because instead of answering him, Davey blinks slowly and reaches towards the head of the mattress where the lamp is, and turns out the light. They’re quite suddenly enveloped in darkness, the numbing, suffocating kind that makes Jade bump into things, blind and infant. 

“Ah shit, dark,” he mumbles. 

“Your eyes will adjust,” Davey tells him, and their legs are touching under the sheet. 

“Um, what, then, if not death?” Jade whispers just so the silence will be occupied by something more solid than the maddening sound of them breathing together. There is a rustling beside him in the blackness. 

“...” Davey’s pause is tangible, and Jade can picture him laying with his mouth open, lips almost forming over something but stopping short. Davey laughs a quiet, sad laugh. “Mmm...” he hums, but still, no answer. 

Jade can hear Davey’s heart speed up, and warmth leaps up from his body and makes the air around them tight and heavy and prickling. Jade’s flesh follows suit, either because he’s nervous, or because Davey has always had some kind of power over him, and his body allows Davey’s to dictate its motions. “Dave?” He prays. 

“...poetry, I guess. I think music, and art provide some temporary salvation.” They are lying so close the breath from Davey’s _p_ in _poetry_ whispers across Jade’s mouth, and he’s never longed for the evaporation of two and a half inches more in his entire life. He thinks about what it means to be alone, and how it’s an affliction they’ll both be plagued with as long as they haven’t earned death. 

But. But what if. 

“But I’m not sure I even believe that anymore,” Davey whispers unstably.

It’s because Davey sounds terrified that Jade has the courage to kiss him. Their hands touch accidentally as Jade leans in beyond his own control, and he loses everything, every fleeting fragment of sanity poetry promised him. All his compassion, all his self control. Jade takes. 

Nothing and Nothing connect as Jade kisses Davey, and he’s only slightly shocked to find that it’s _so much better_ than he imagined. So much better than sonnets, or dreams, or thunder, or poetry, or even death. 

Davey’s mouth is trembling and wet and inelegant, and Jade’s slides against it with a film of citrus saliva. Their tongues touch tentatively, then they press together as Davey’s breath hisses out of him, and Jade can’t fucking get enough, he can’t _ever_ imagine getting enough of this, this taste and this feeling and this tight, raging explosion splitting his chest. Davey rakes his hands across Jade’s sternum, under his shirt, perhaps searching for the seam he’s undone. There is so much ragged breath between them, but still, not enough. 

Jade moves so his body is covering Davey’s, and their flat planes press together like things trying to readhere. And this is what he wanted. What he’s wanted for so much longer than he realized he did.

It feels so good, too good, and Jade is fucking terrified. Davey’s hands claw at his back, fingertips digging into the ridges of muscle framing the vulnerability of Jade’s spine, and he imagines opening up in one long wound along his back like a cicada carcass split under the sun. Their mouths fit together, and Davey’s voice is almost lost in the subduction but he manages to breathe, “ _This_ , this is what I meant.” 

And Jade says back, “I know,” and then thinks with a detached and infant understanding: _these fragments are shored against my ruins_ and gets it for the first fucking time. After that, he stops thinking. 

~*~

Jade wonders if it’s mistake. Nothing real is better than something conceived of. If it is, then what’s the point of art? Of death? But he’s not thinking clearly, not with the semi-circle bite-mark of precise, dappled violet on his abdomen, between two pale freckles. Not with the bruise on his shoulder he can’t quite see yet, imagined and tender like the scratches on his back which frame his spinal cord, grey in the dawn light. Not with these marks that will fade, but haven’t yet. They’re distracting, real and stinging and nearly breathing, not unlike Jade, who lies paralyzed for close to an hour when he wakes up that morning in Davey’s empty bed. 

Orange peels on the carpet. Davey’s voice echoing somewhere in the kitchen. Cracks on the ceiling like divisive rivers between watermark islands he’s never noticed before. These are the things that keep him bound in Davey’s sheets, sweating and terrified. 

It’s only when Davey stumbles back in, eyes as dark and scared as Jade remembers them from between last’s night’s kisses, that Jade starts breathing again. 

“Hey,” Davey says stupidly, wringing the hem of his shirt between his fists and looking very young. He irritates Jade, standing there. Something about the oversize black fabric tenting around him and the wet-shine of his hair reminds Jade of Dave in high school, his enormous smile and constant, fervent motion Jade later learned disguised a hidden darkness. 

“Hey,” he says after he swallows, allowing the irritation to flicker and die in his chest, replaced by a resurrected restlessness that whirs mechanically, ticking like clockwork. Before Jade can stop himself, he’s shaking. 

“Uh, Adam and I are going to this farmers market thing if you want to go,” he says. 

Jade snorts. “What?! No. I’m in bed still. I don’t want to go,” he stutters, meaning something closer to _what the fuck is going on between you and me?_

Davey sighs a sigh that sounds close to relief. “I don’t either.” 

“Then don’t,” Jade says firmly. He clenches his hands in the sheets to still their tremors. 

Davey hangs suspended in his room between the doorframe and his mattress, eyes glistening like water and mouth an unsure shape. “Okay,” he says, but he doesn’t move. r32;  
Jade counts breaths like seconds before approaching thunder, and his heart tick ticks, _I am I am I am_. Then, _you are you are you are_. Then, finally _I want_. “Dave, c’mere,” He mumbles and it comes out so desperate he instantly hates himself for needing anything, for existing, for being mortal. But it only lasts for a second, because he can’t properly form coherent thoughts when Davey shuts his door behind him then approaches, getting close enough he can put himself on top of Jade, heavy and hot and breathing in wild, graceless gasps. 

With his hands instantly alighting to the tense muscles in Davey’s shoulders, Jade feels that Davey’s shaking, too. 

“This is so stupid, so fucking stupid. We are so dumb,” Davey hisses into the quick, fluttering part of Jade’s neck. Gooseflesh follows his words, and Jade’s hips buck involuntarily under the insistent weight of Davey’s, and they grind together. 

“What?” 

“I...you still want to, right?” Davey asks, turning his head so they can regard each other with wide, pleading eyes. His teeth chatter, this quiet rattling against Jade’s bones. “Even though it’s dumb?” 

“Why is it dumb?” Jade whispers, even though he knows. He’s known the whole time, of course. It’s why he could only imagine it, it’s why he couldn’t read Davey’s lyrics, it’s why he’s been standing still with his eyes shut praying for the earth to stop orbiting. 

Davey laughs hollowly and it echos through Jade, vibrates deep in his chest. It’s hard to listen to anything Davey’s saying when they’re pressed together like this, but Jade catches him explain, “You...this...it just has the capability to...fuck, I dunno Jade. You tell me,” 

“Everything could change,” Jade whispers, distracted to near silence as Davey’s eyes darken and he leans forward, catching the corner of Jade’s mouth with his chapped lips. Jade groans, and they both still. 

“Everything _will_ change,” Davey breathes. 

Jade rides his exhalation, their chests rising and falling in tandem, expanding into each other's concaves and deficits. He knows that Davey’s right. He knows that this will change _everything_...the band, the music, his body. That the power of he and Davey’s combined darkness, thrumming and in love, could destroy his flesh and split it once and for all, every single one of those prayers and scars flaying along his forearm, opening him up to infection. 

Or, it could build something. It could change the band, the music, his habit, his life, _him_...but it could change the fucking _world_. It could continue being better than he imagined. Jade doesn’t know, but for the first time in his life, he can’t bring himself and his fear and his statis to care. 

Davey, on top of him, kisses the pulse in his throat and it surges river-like beneath his lips, thundering while Jade shakes and shakes. “I know,” Jade answers. 

“Fuck,” Davey mumbles. “Jade you have to understand...I want you _so fucking bad_ , I feel like it’s going to tear me apart. You have to get that,” he wheezes desperately, nails biting into Jade’s ribs as if so prove to him how much. Warn him that it’s going to hurt sometimes, because they’re fucked up and imperfect and its supposed to be that way.

Jade closes his eyes and allows the current to swallow him whole. “It’s okay. You can tear me apart instead,” he offers with his lips against Davey’s. Without realizing it they’re kissing again, soft and fierce and all at once, and Jade wonders how on earth his body can withstand so much sensation without caving in.This will make him crazy. Or, it could be the only temporary salvation before death. The absolute in life they’ve both been looking for. r32;  
He feels Davey’s hands, with their sureness and strength, untangle from his hair and take a steady path from Jade’s shoulders, to his biceps, and finally down to the space between the bones in his elbow and the bones in his wrists. His fists grip there; his teeth tighten recklessly against Jade’s lower lip, hips locking. 

As Jade stops breathing, Davey becomes one solid, wavering line of tension, taut and painful and broken, like the cables of a demolished bridge. And it is in that moment when Jade realizes that this might be the only brand of stillness he feels for a long time. This is it, and beyond this bridge-stillness, he is giving himself up to tumult. To Davey’s madness, to his darkness and his poetry and his music and his brilliance and his constant, raging motion. 

But when Davey releases the moment of paralysis and returns to the mauling kisses and rolling, rhythmless thrusts, Jade stops thinking, the last attempt in his mind to keep himself anchored in the harbor fading eventually to _fuck, I’m his anyway. Let it take me._ And he does.


End file.
